Between Sept. 1, 2023, and Aug. 31, 2024, more than 300 COVID-19 outbreaks were declared at Alberta Health Services and Covenant Health acute care facilities throughout the province, according to data from AHS obtained through a freedom of information request.
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Dr. Joe Vipond, an emergency physician in Calgary and co-founder of the Canadian COVID Society, said it is worrisome that patients are being harmed and that steps aren’t taken to adequately protect them.
“The reality is that people are dying from COVID in our hospitals, and we really are doing very little to prevent them getting ill and getting infected,” Vipond said. “And we wouldn’t do the same for any other infectious disease.”
“We have sporadic implementation of protection for patients. And if I was somebody’s daughter, and my dad went into hospital with a hip fracture and came out in a casket or had some kind of long-term disability from getting COVID in hospital when we know how to prevent it, I would be very mad at the system.”
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Vipond said in an ideal world there would be an independent third-party audit of the health system that would determine what is going wrong.
“But instead, what seems to have happened is that our politicians, and therefore society, have decided that COVID is no longer an issue for anyone, and that includes vulnerable patients in hospitals.”